Rachel Morgain

On the use of the uncanny in ritual

In ‘The Future of an Illusion’, Freud suggested that religion allows a person to ‘feel at home in the uncanny’ – that unsettling interplay of suppression and memory that arises from living subject to fears and anxieties in an unpredictable world. Here, the author examines a ritual called the ‘Wild Hunt’ that occurred during her ethnographic research among contemporary Pagans to explore how uncanny encounters within religious rituals can help participants come to terms with fears and anxieties, transforming inchoate emotions stemming from trauma or dislocation. Following Otto, the author suggests that such a sense of the uncanny can be central to the power of religious ritual. These uncanny elements within religious ritual provide an illustration of how religious experiences can help participants to feel ‘at home in the uncanny’, thereby bringing together the seemingly disparate accounts of Otto and Freud on the relationship between religion and uncanny experience.

Living Water: Christian Theologies and Interethnic Relations in Fiji

In multiethnic Fiji, where ethnic relations are often seen as fraught and potentially charged with conflict, and where religion closely follows lines of ethnicity, attempts by Christian churches to mediate interethnic relations and build multiethnic congregations can face difficult challenges. In this article, two contrasting Christian theologies are explored, both of which draw on theologies of water as a means of mediating interethnic engagements. In these examples, processes of forging interethnic relationships are seen as variously harmonious and dissonant, unifying and separating. Drawing connections between the layered imagery of water employed in these Christian contexts and wider Pacific imaginaries of water in baptism and in the ocean, I explore these shifting processes of forging interethnic relationships in the contested context of contemporary Fiji.